Kiran Reddy Bokkala

Linux cheat sheet & self understanding ways of commands

NOTE: For every command in Linux, it will have man pages and help option which will help you to
understand more about the usage of command and possible flags to use.
 For example, I want to use useradd command, but I am not sure about the flags, then you check
the usage as shown below.
 useradd - -help (or) useradd -h
 man 1 useradd (or just) man useradd

Linux man pages are grouped into sections:

Section Description
1 User Commands (like ls, grep)
2 System Calls (like open, read)
3 Library Functions (like printf)
4 Special Files (like /dev/null)
5 File Formats (like /etc/passwd)
8 System Admin Commands (like mount, ifconfig)

If two commands have the same name, you can specify which section like 2,5,3:
For example, crontab command comes under command as well as file formatting command
 man 5 crontab
 man 1 crontab
• User and Group Management
• useradd – Add a new user
• usermod – Modify user account
• userdel – Delete a user
• groupadd – Create a new group
• groupdel – Delete a group
• passwd – Change user password
• id – Show user and group IDs
• groups – Show groups of a user
• Process Management
• ps – Display running processes
• top – Monitor real-time processes
• htop – Interactive process viewer (better top)
• kill – Send signal to a process (usually to terminate)
• killall – Kill processes by name
• nice – Start a process with a set priority
• renice – Change priority of a running process
• bg – Resume suspended jobs in background
• fg – Resume jobs in foreground
• Logging
• dmesg – View kernel ring buffer logs
• journalctl – Query and view systemd logs
• tail -f /var/log/syslog – Live view of system logs
• cat /var/log/auth.log – View authentication logs
• less /var/log/messages – Browse system messages log
• Monitoring
• vmstat – Report system performance
• iostat – Show CPU and disk I/O statistics
• free -h – Display memory usage
• uptime – Show system uptime and load
• sar – Collect, report, or save system activity
• Permissions Management
• chmod – Change file permissions
• chown – Change file owner and group
• chgrp – Change group ownership
• umask – Set default permissions for new files
• File Management
• cp – Copy files and directories
• mv – Move/rename files and directories
• rm – Delete files and directories
• mkdir – Create directories
• rmdir – Remove empty directories
• find – Search for files in a directory hierarchy
• locate – Find files by name quickly (using database)
• Logs
• (covered earlier under "Logging", but also:)
• logrotate – Manage the automatic rotation and compression of logs
• grep "error" /var/log/syslog – Search specific errors in logs
• Network Management
• ip a – Show IP addresses
• ifconfig – Display network interfaces (older way)
• ping – Test network connectivity
• traceroute – Trace route to a host
• netstat – Display network connections (deprecated; replaced by ss)
• ss – Display detailed network socket info
• curl – Transfer data from or to a server
• wget – Download files from the web
• Disk Management
• df -h – Show disk space usage
• du -sh * – Show size of directories/files
• lsblk – List information about block devices
• fdisk -l – List partition tables
• mount – Mount a filesystem
• umount – Unmount a filesystem
• Package Handling
• apt update – Update package lists (Debian/Ubuntu)
• apt upgrade – Upgrade installed packages
• apt install package – Install a package
• apt remove package – Remove a package
• yum install package – Install package (RHEL/CentOS)
• yum remove package – Remove package (RHEL/CentOS)
• Service Handling
• systemctl start service – Start a service
• systemctl stop service – Stop a service
• systemctl restart service – Restart a service
• systemctl status service – Check service status
• systemctl enable service – Enable service to start on boot
• systemctl disable service – Disable service from starting on boot
• Task Scheduling
• crontab -e – Edit cron jobs for scheduling tasks
• crontab -l – List scheduled cron jobs
• at – Schedule a one-time task
• systemctl list-timers – List active systemd timers
• Troubleshooting Commands
• ping – Check network connectivity
• traceroute – Diagnose network path
• netstat -tulnp – Check active ports and services
• dmesg | less – Check hardware errors
• journalctl -xe – View detailed error logs
• free -m – Check memory issues
• uptime – See if the server load is high